


Camera Lenses. Part One

by LaraGr1ms



Category: Original Work
Genre: 14-year-old girl, 40-year-old man, Blog, Cage, Cameras, Dictatorship, Domestic Violence, Escape, Fast fingers, Female Protagonist, Fire, Government Conspiracy, Nightmares, Original Fiction, Photography, Pictures, Post-War, Writer, computer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-24
Updated: 2016-05-24
Packaged: 2018-06-10 09:47:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6951430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaraGr1ms/pseuds/LaraGr1ms





	Camera Lenses. Part One

She tapped away at her computer, the keyboard missing half of its letters but her fingers instinctively knew where the letters were. Her fingers were flying across the keys as her computer, huffing and puffing, tried to keep up. The blinking, grey screen of her computer was full of paragraphs and pictures, her thoughts creating substance on an invisible web of connections. The view count for her last post reached 5,000, and it was her goal to beat that number. Her blog has reached a following of about 50,000 people. A modest number, she thought, I’m not obscure but not yet a game changer. The light on her ceiling flickered threateningly, buzzing as it tried to go out. She glared at it, and that seemed to make it change its mind. She went back to typing, pausing only to push the glasses back up to the bridge of her nose. 

 "Hey Pest, it's time for dinner!" She popped a vein. Her name is Tempest. She really hates that nickname, and he knows it too. She ignored him, completely absorbed in her writing. She felt a prick of fear, though, pausing for half a second. If he knew what she wrote about, he’d kill her, that much she was certain. 

“I’m not going to say it a second time, Pest. Get down here.” He was talking at a normal level, and yet their floors might as well have been cardboard. Despite his appearance, she felt he had the presence of a soldier, a commander. At the very least, his voice held a particular weight over her, as though he could squash her in between his thick fingers.  
She shook her head slightly, trying to chase away the bad thoughts. She stretched her arms above her head, arching her back against her chair. A dull throb ran down from her neck and shoulders all the way to her lower back due to her sitting in the same position for who knows how long? She stared at the ceiling, her arm over the back of her chair. Her mouth pressed into a fine line as she steeled herself into returning back to reality, clinging to her ideas and storing them in the back of her mind for later. The emotions she repressed grew like a parasite in her chest. Escape….run…don’t look back…leave now…Peeling herself away from her post felt like someone was taking the only part of her that was real. Despite hours of use, her fingers longed for her keyboard, longed to put words on the screen, as if her blog was someone who had died and she was mourning the loss of their company. I want out of this place…. That one phrase echoed in her head and sent daggers into her heart. 

She turned in her rotating chair to stare at the wall above her bed, a knot forming in her stomach. Posters of government officials and leaders clustered every inch of her wall as if they were going to ambush her in her sleep. Small pictures she had taken were pasted overtop those posters in thick layers, only the faces of the officials still showed. What she deemed to be beautiful weren’t sunsets and rainbows, flowers or kittens, but instead signs that provided hope that mankind had not given up. Graffiti that left its mark on the skyscraping walls of steel, remnants of cities that survived the bomb blasts from 50 years ago, beautiful murals that covered old shopping district walls in direct rebellion against the 15th act, all of those beautiful things were dotted and scattered behind her fake pictures, pictures she took for him and for the government, pictures that she despised solely because they were the stark contrast of her pictures, signs mankind that had given up. People bowing their heads and throwing up their hands to the retribution squad, people strung up on poles in the courtyard, the only open space for miles that hadn’t been taken up by steel contraptions or reclaimed by thick forests, and so many more pictures that made her heart scream in protest. 

She gripped her torso, flashes of memories that she continually locked away bubbling up yet again, and she beat them down as tears piqued from the corners of her eyes. Calm down….calm….calm… She inhaled and exhaled with determined, slow breaths, the pain filling her chest, but instead of consuming her it turned into a fuel to stoke the fire in her heart. She very slowly relaxed her body, slouching into her chair, eyes closed, head leaned back. Calm… 

Just as she finally again reached a level of logical reasoning, however, her heart jumped up into her throat as she heard the creak of the stairs, stairs that led only to her room and a bathroom, but she knew it was her he was after. She slid back over to her desk, and with a swift movement of her mouse she clicked save, her heart pounding as the loading symbol seemed to be permanently fixed on her screen. She heard his hand touch the knob of her door, just as the Saved dialogue box appeared. She clicked out of her blog, returning to her news tab, where the puppet President was making his address. 

He wriggled the doorknob, frustrated that it was locked. “You know this won’t save you, Pest. Open the door.” His voice was low and menacing. Her heart was lodged in her throat. She stood up, barely dressed in an old baggy t-shirt, and very short pajama shorts that didn’t even reach mid-thigh. An acute alertness sent her heart into overdrive, so she grabbed her pepper spray from off her desk and she took a defense stance in front of the door. 

“I’m not decent.” She said it in a low voice, the silent warning saying, Don’t come in here, or I’ll spray you. 

“Do you honestly think I care? I am a forty-year-old man; why would I want a 14-year-old girl’s body. Your hair is like a filthy crow’s and you don’t even have breasts yet.” Despite what he said, his voice felt as though his hands were already upon her and she shivered in disgust. It was as though he truly enjoyed mocking her and insulting her.  
“I’m not opening the door.” She stated, rebellion thick in her throat. “Once I change, I’ll be downstairs to eat dinner.” Her muscles tensed in anticipation. Will he barge in…or leave her alone? The silence was thick in the air, pressing on her eardrums, her heartbeat the only thing she could hear. 

He started grumbling, his feet tapping the floor impatiently. She could feel the anger coming off him in waves, despite being separated by a door.  
“Fine…but don’t forget to bring me your damn pictures…” His voice lowered, hissing through his teeth as he spoke. With that he stomped down the stairs, so hard that she was surprised that his feet didn’t go through the boards as rotten as they were.

She gulped, her stomach churning with fear and stress. Her breath hitched as she thought of those pictures. She balled her fists as her swirl of emotions got the best of her and she kicked the door of her small cupboard of a closet that was right next to her desk. Frustration. Fear. Horror. Despair. Rage. It felt like she was being consumed.  
As the rage settled in her bones, becoming the dominant emotion that plagued her thoughts, she dressed in her plain khakis and a plain Jane t-shirt, a boring, diluted grey, violence aching in her hands. Her thoughts soon shifted to what would come tonight, where she’d go, what she’d do, and that seemed to give her some peace of mind, even if she’d have to sit next to her uncle during a meal and show him pictures of…that.

She went downstairs in silence. Her muscles tensed and her heart beat began to throb inside her ears as she stopped just behind the couch, not even looking at him directly, and waited to see if her uncle would move from the TV he sat in front of. He knew she was there, and gave her a grunt and a nod to go get food. With that she grabbed a bowl of her uncle’s staple of bad cooking, potatoes and cabbage soup, and sat down at their wobbly kitchen table to eat. It was plain, had no flavor, and the ingredients weren’t even fully cooked and crunched weirdly inside her mouth. After she finished, she rinsed the bowl and grabbed the folder she had put her pictures in off the table and finally looked toward her uncle. He was a hulking figure squatting on such a tiny couch, staring fixated on the rerun of the President’s address from earlier today. The words faded into nothingness because that’s just what they were. Nothing. Fake. Things like the improvement of the division system, opportunities to increase in rank, and how we, the citizens, were valued more than anything else, that we needed to continually work hard to improve our nation. Her uncle, completely oblivious now to her existence sat with a notepad in hand taking notes for his next issue in the government paper and mumbling indiscernibly to himself.

“I’m leaving my pictures on the table and heading to bed. We need our strength for tomorrow’s gathering.” If she said stuff like that as if she cared for their standing, he wouldn’t direct his anger at her tonight.

After having left her uncle to his thoughts and preparing for sleep, she laid still in her bed, tension tightening her muscles and quickening her breath. Her house, thin like a stack of cards, was loud with the tiny sounds of her uncle downstairs. The floors were so thin she could even still hear him scribbling his notes. It’s still so dangerous, she thought to herself, what I’m doing. If he were to ever catch her leaving after curfew, the government retribution that would come would be the least of her worries. Her heart was like a freight train in her ears as it throbbed and pounded behind her ribs. Her senses were sharpened and the small, acute details bombarded her like stinging needles. She knew she would have to wait until he was so dead asleep that he was lost to the world. That’d take at least two hours, knowing this from the past observations from when she first decided to leave the house at night. It happened due to the fact that she reached her limit, her lack of sleep pushing her towards insanity.  
She gripped her sheets until the skin on her knuckles turned white. Her memories, like beasts unleashed from their cages, held dominance at night while she tried desperately for sleep. She gasped for air now as tears leaked from the corners of her eyes once again. She could still hear their voices despite not being there in her room, begging her to help, cursing her for what she was, and she could still see them, framed in her camera lenses, their faces contorted in agony and misery. Those people, those pictures, they were her weakness, the one point of vulnerability she could never avoid or get away from. Life felt like nothingness when those people were framed in her lenses. This is inhumane. The crying scream inside her would say. Not so much as a whisper would escape her lips, though, as another shutter sound ripped through her ears as she took another picture.  
She remembered handing the camera to her uncle after the gathering in the city square that day, and saying “Can you turn these pictures in for me? I’m just…a little tired. Today was…especially hot.” Visions of fire flashed across her eyes, and she fought a shiver of horror from running down her spine.  
She was looking at the ground, so she couldn’t see his hand coming to strike her across the face. Her small body convulsed, the strike had enough force to throw her to the ground.

“You’re…. tired, you say?” She looked up to him, emotion completely gone from her face, but a mix of fear, shock, and rage tightened inside her chest. This bloody monster... His eyes were cold, his face full of wrinkles and fat that thickened his chin and neck. His shoulders were bulky and broad, and she felt like she was miles away from them because he was so tall. The uniform he wore made her want to gag because it was the same one she wore. His face…is ugly…The thought trickled through her subconscious. It wasn’t the fat, the acne scars, the sunburn or the moles that made her think that. It was his eyes. They were almost black, and they were filled with greed, bitterness, and hate. It made his face contort in ways that made him look inhuman, like a monster.

“You are so selfish.” He spat on the ground beside her. “The only way for me to make money and gain enough status to get out of this hellhole is by those pictures we take, and every time you screw up, every time you say something stupid, they cut my pay by half. Do you hear me? By half!” His voice was getting louder. “And you want to skip out on turning in my pictures because you’re a little tired.” He imitated her voice poorly, mocking her, and his fingers made quotation marks in the air. “If you skip out, and I take your pictures up there, do you know what would happen? They’d ask where you were, and I’d say ‘Oh, she couldn’t turn in her own pictures because she was a little tired.” He shook his head, sighing. “They’d laugh in my face and, you guessed it, cut my pay again!”

He grabbed her by her arm and yanked her off the ground. “So no, you little shit, you’re turning in your own damn pictures.” He half dragged her to the government building that was adjacent to the city square as she remained limp, not saying a single word and void of any emotion or care at all.

She gasped, lurching up in her bed, escaping the dream and returning back to her bedroom. She shivered as she was drenched in sweat. She sat staring at her desk that sat directly across from her bed. It sat like a beacon in her dark room, a hope that she had never had before. It was her way of reaching out, of telling everyone, including herself, not to give up. Her writing, her determination, her sense that all was not lost, those things weren’t entirely her own. If it wasn’t for that woman, she’d still be huddled in the dark, haunted by pictures of the people she couldn’t save. She broadened her shoulders and let out a determined breath. It was time.  
 


End file.
